Animals Of The Savannah!

This time of year the natives are RESTLESS!  It's cold.  It's icy.  It's icky, rainy, stuck-inside, too-cold-to-breathe kind of days of winter. 

The children get grumpy.  They get cabin fever.  I get cabin fever.  We are a "play in the muck with flip flops and trucks" kind of crew.  

But we can't....

This is the time of year that tests the most creative teacher.  If the "dog days of summer" are long and hard, these should be called the "wicked days of winter." It's charge is to keep the rebels at bay with arts and crafts, songs a plenty, and enough play dough to drown a Weebles bus!  

Fun studies like our Animals of the Savannah by Mother Goose Time help keep little minds learning and busy bodies moving!  

  Just like their sweet little feet, no two giraffes are alike!!  We just giggled at how adorable these turned out!! 

We made these long necked cuties by tracing each child's foot for the head (see how the heal is the giraffe's chin?).  We then cut out a long neck and ears with the same color of yellow paper.  Add some nubs at the top with a marker, sticky eyes, some brown crayon spots and yarn mane and you have an ADORABLE animal friend!!  

Sponsor shout out time!!! :)

THANK YOU www.mothergoosetime.com for this cute craft...we LOVED it!

Ohhhh.....Emmmm....Geeee.....  

​Too much cute to bottle up in one little pic!!  These kiddos just keep up hoppin'!  They LOVED making some toilet paper roll binoculars!  As you can see it didn't take them long to use them...

This was such a simple little project from MGT.  It just took two toilet paper sized rolls, a strip of paper long enough to wrap around them, a long piece of yarn and glue.  

LOTS OF GLUE!

As a HUGE believer in letting littles DIY, each child is provided their own bottle of glue to squeeze, squish, and puddle when the project calls for it.  This one was a huge hit due to the "glue factor" of a solid 10!  It took a LOT of glue to get the paper to adhere to the rolls well enough for the binoculars to take shape.  We then poked a couple of holes, tied off the yarn and BINGO was his NAME-O, we have some Savannah worthy binoculars!

Add some zebras and lions to the mix and we have ourselves a regular ZOO!

No study of the Savannah would be complete without some fierce lions!  Here we are busily making our lions masks and practicing our lion ROARS!  

This easy peasy project from www.mothergoosetime.com was the perfect mix of arts and crafts, fine motor skills, and science.  We discussed the lions mane and that the lioness does not have a mane.  We observed the colors and sounds of lions.

We used the provided yellow construction paper and cut them into many strips of differing sizes.  After instructing the children to glue the strips "around" the paper plate circle we just put it all in the middle of the table and watched them pretend, play, and create!!

Zebra has many stripes!!

  
We listened to the sounds that a zebra makes and the children were all chatty and giggly trying out their ability to make a zebra sound!  This is the Youtube video we used in class to practice being a zebra.  

This led to ALL sorts of questions about zebras.  What do they eat?  Where do they live?  Can we ride them?  We learned that zebras stay together for "camouflage" (new science vocabulary word) and that no two zebra's stripes are the same.  They are each unique just like us.

We learned that zebras eat grass mostly, but also like leaves and in the zoo will eat fruit as well.  We visited this site that has a TON of great animal facts for children 

http://kids.sandiegozoo.org/animals/mammals/zebra

The San Diego Zoo has a YouTube channel that is VERY child friendly with all sorts of wonderful animal videos like this sweet one below!!  

In addition to all the fun animal studies we did over the past two weeks. We also practiced the letters "Z: for Zebra, "S" for snake, and the numbers "9" and "10."  We made new play dough and observed our animal tracks in the dough along with truck and train tracks.  All in all we have had a busy two weeks of PLAY!  

As always....I wish you well and I hope you get to play today!

​-L